interesting that this was brought up. i met a Jew from india the other day, and he was telling me about how long jewish people have been there. i found this on the net:
This is pretty good stuff. I had head about the Ethiopian Jews, but I hadn't heard about the groups in S. Africa or India.
All very interesting stuff but I'm dissapointed that Jesus doesn't look Scott Stapp One thing I'm wondering is if too much is being made of Jewish as a ethnic category while ignoring that there are and have people who were Jewish by religion but not what we think of as ethnicity. For instance I believe that Yemen at one time was one of the most important Jewish Kingdoms and there have even historically been Chinese Jews. Just saying that certain groups are Jewish might not mean that they are ethnically the same as the European Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. Also in regard to the European Jews I would presume there was some level of intermarriage since there are very light skinned and fair haired Ashkenazi and also Jews from Eastern Europe that have Slavic features. I don't
Additional irony is that all the first Christians were Jewish. Some people will search for any reason to hate. They will always exist, but hopefully they will diminish. As for getting people to believe it, maybe it would take years. I continually frame the ME conflict in my mind as a family fight. I think it helps retain a helpful perspective. Maybe if some leaders did likewise...
Did you even read the links? There are strong genetic markers in the Jewish populations that indicate very low intermarriage rates. That fact that ancestry can be traced through genes would, IMO, should quickly settle any debate about 'Jewish' being an ethnicity or 'race' if you prefer. It would probably have been helpful if there was a different word for Jews of Jewish ancestry and Jews of the Jewish religion (but I believe that Conservative or Orthodox Jews do not recognize converts, so for them these definitions would be the same people). Anyway, not a big issue, eh?
The original Hebrews and the Arabs were essentially the same ethnic group. Over the past thousands of years, as the Arabs conquered lands all the way from the Atlantic to the Indian ocean and elsewhere, they inter-married and mixed with the local populations. That's why, for example, North African Arabs and Arabs of the Levant look different from Persian Gulf Arabs, who in turn look different from Sudanese Arabs, etc. The 'purest' Arabs (if there's such a thing) are likely inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula. But the Egyptians, the Moroccans, the Algerians, the Lebanese, the Syrians are more or less 'mixed', if that's the right word. Generally speaking, it really shouldn't make a damn difference. Racial/ethnic confusion is a good thing.
I haven't had much of a time to catch up Clutchfans so I mostly skimmed this thread and didn't have a chance to read the links. That said while there was few intermarriage I'm presuming the genetic markers don't show that there was NO intermarriage. There might've been enough to transmit certain traits light light skin and hair to the Ashkenazi Jews and Slavic Jews.
Was Jesus Black? well duh... Come on guys, this wasn't posted until page 3? This is a basketball board!!!
In fact I believe this is more or less technically accurate. The Cohanim marker is a Y-chromosome male marker, so presence only confirms patralineal Jewish ancestry. I believe the traditional method of determining "Jewishness" is matrilineal descent so there may be some issue there. It would, I believe, be possible to include non-Jewish mothers at various intervals and not have problems with the Y-Chromosome DNA test. I think a mRNA marker would be somewhat more appropriate? IIRC, mRNA is passed unaltered from mothers to children. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong. Furthermore, this gene only shows up in a subsection of the Jewish population, and most likely wasn't 100% present in even the "purest" Jewish population. On the other hand, one should keep in mind the historical nature of the Jewish populations in Europe and Asia, and understand how that might affect intermarriage. First, for most of this Diaspora marriage in Europe was a somewhat more formal affair. Secondly, the primary reason that Jewish populations are singled out wherever they go is that they maintain their traditional language, customs, and culture. In essence they stayed separate from the cultures that they mixed with. With the exception of the years when the Jews in Spain were forced to pretend to conform, for instance, I think there is very clear sociological evidence that would support the idea that Jewish intermarriage with Europeans would be significantly lower than I think most people would imagine at first glance. I also believe that those cases where offspring did occur the children would be more likely to become integrated into the greater European population surrounding them, as opposed to maintaining Jewish customs and practices. In all the history of Europe, I only can think of one example where this may not be true: The Reign of King Boleslav in Poland. In terms of "Jewish Ethnic Features" perhaps people that haven't spent time around large Jewish populations might not necessarily understand that white American media skew means that the Jewish celebrities like Barbara Streisand aren't representative of the Jewish population in terms of racial features but instead is the WASP-iest looking subgroup? Edit: I found a page that claims that 10% of randomly selected people on a Tel Aviv beach have the Cohanim gene, and 50% of the people who have a name that is derived from the name "Cohen" have this gene. I guarantee that the percentage of the Jewish population who could be confused with people of Arab ancestry far excedes 10% and probably significantly excedes 50% Actually, I've been trying to get a handle on this for quite a while with little to no success. Given the vast success of Islamic expansion for about 200 years I imagine that intermixing could have been possible but I just don't know the nature of the conquering peoples and their relationships with the conquered. It is my understanding that a reasonable amount (though not all) of the "swarthiness" of southern Spain, southern Italy, and areas of the Balkans is from "Saracen" genes? Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. Clearly, some populations commonly known as "Arab" who are Muslim are really of other similar ethnic backgrounds like Berbers or the various Persian ethnicities and even sometimes Turks. I also am given to understand that there was lots of internal back and forth among distinct Arab populations. The Marmaluks, for instance, apparently were once widespread and even ruled Egypt and apparently are "extinct" but I have difficulty finding more than that.
It would be pretty cool to see a picture of an Asian Jesus. Or even an Asian Santa Claus, for that matter.
All this talk about race and ethnicity got me thinking... Of course, everyone understands that Hitler believed the Aryan to be superior to all other races. Aryans account for about 2/3 of Indians (the south is Dravidian and the very north has pockets of Sino-Tibetan peoples), Pakistan, Bangladesh, about 2/3 of Iran, Armenia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and all of Europe except for the Finns, Magyar, Turks, Estonians, Sami (a.k.a. Lapplanders) and Basque. Of course, Sicily and Spain have heavy Arab blood ratios. Both are probably close to half Arab ethnically. Hitler believed that his war for racial superiority would either mean that the Aryans would overcome the non-Aryans or that they would be destroyed. At the end of WWII the Germans (under the command of Albert Speer) were to initiate Unternehmen Clausewitz. This was a self-destruction, scorched earth operation that was to destroy Germany. Albert Speer was not at all interested in doing that, so he violated his orders and spared Germany from self-destruction. Hitler believed that the German people had proven that they were not superior. He had talked himself into a corner that left only on conclusion. Besides the irony of Germany proving to the Nazis that indeed it was not superior by losing, the only people that the Nazis were killing were in fact Aryans. The Russians, Poles, and Serbs who were earmarked for extermination were mostly Aryans. Then you say, “but what about the Gypsies?” They are Aryans from Indian who migrated to Europe via Upper Egypt. “Well, then what about the Jews?” For 2,000 years the Jews were living in Europe that is 100 generations. Do the math. Even if only 1% of the population was exogamous every generation, well 100 generation times 1%. Hmmm. But then you say, “but the Jews did such a good job of not mixing” (Icelanders too). I wonder what the minimum is to avoid inbreeding, but I would bet that 1% is still very isolated. Indeed the Ashkanazim means “German.” Not only is Yiddish a Germanic (and therefore Aryan) language, but genetically and even by name European Jews were essentially Aryans. Of course this is not true of Sephardim and Mizrahim, but those Jews were not living in Europe. So of the 40,000,000 Europeans killed in WWII 39,700,000 were Ayrans. 300,000 Finns and Magyar died in WWII. Finns and Magyar are Finno-Urgics from central Asia. And of course Finland and Hungary were German allies. Hitler the biggest champion of the Aryan cause was the biggest killer of Aryans in history. Oh the irony...
Since no one has an accurate portrayal of Jesus to this date, you can make him look whatever way you want him to look, since the Europeans basically took the initiative to make him a blue-eyed, blond-haired man and exported that to conquered lands to help perpetuate the idea that they're ethnically superior. In reality, however, Jesus was a Hebrew, and he most likely was a brown-skinned Semite.
i've seen murals of different renderings of Christ from people across cultures..across nations. he's depicted as yellow, black, white and virtually every other color under the sun. the murals are beautiful. i also saw christ depicted as a lion, recently.
We have a talking chimp as President and it doesn't seem to bother a lot of fundamentalist Christians...
